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A hands-on guide that walks you through the iterative process of UX prototyping with Axure

Who This Book Is For

This book is written for UX practitioners, business analysts, product managers, and anyone else who is involved in UX projects. The book assumes that you have no or very little familiarity with Axure. It will help you if you are evaluating the tool for an upcoming project or are required to quickly get up to speed in a project you just joined. The book assumes some familiarity with the principles of the User Centred Design methodology.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Prototyping Fundamentals

The art of UX prototyping

The prototyping checklist

Balancing act: What stakeholders have to say

The UX perspective

Axure around the world

The Axure perspective

Summary

Chapter 2: Axure Basics—the User Interface

Getting started

The Axure workspace

The Sitemap pane

The Page Properties pane

The Widgets pane

The Widget Properties pane

The Wireframe pane

The Masters pane

The Dynamic Panel Manager

The toolbar and menu bar

Axure file formats

Summary

Chapter 3: Prototype Construction Basics

Prototyping principles

Alexandria, the Digital Library Project

Getting started—productivity in 30 minutes

Getting started with masters and dynamic Panels

Adding visual effects

Adding sketch effects

Updating task flow diagrams

Practitioner's corner—Axure prototyping for mobile devices

Summary

Chapter 4: Interactivity 101

Interaction design—brief history

Axure interactions primer

Guided example

Axure events

User triggered events

Axure cases

Summary

Chapter 5: Advanced Interactions

Conditions

The Condition Builder

Troubleshooting conditions

Raised events

Variables

Variable types

Naming variables

How variables can help in usability testing

Pros and cons of using variables

Tips and techniques from the experts

Summary

Chapter 6: Widget Libraries

Axure's built-in libraries

Axure and community libraries

Your own widget library

Expanding the library—design patterns

Managing widget libraries

Local masters or external widget libraries?

Practitioner's corner

Summary

Chapter 7: Managing Prototype Change

From vision to reality

Aligning expectations

Estimating Axure work

Transitioning from concept to detailed design

Foundations and scaffoldings

Widget style editor

Style painter

Integrating with the project style guide and CSS

To sync or not to sync?

Summary

Chapter 8: Functional Specifications

Collaboration with the development team

Capturing UI specifications

Generating specifications

Summary

Chapter 9: Collaboration

Shared projects

Best practices for UX Axure teamwork

Feedback from stakeholders—the Discussion tab

Summary

What You Will Learn

Learn the essential principles of prototyping

Construct well-formed wireframes

Create interactive prototypes in low and high fidelity

Manage iterative design workflow

Annotate and generate UX specifications documents

Team work: Develop UX prototypes using Axure’s collaboration features

Use and create custom widgets and libraries for interaction and visual design patterns

Plan and organize your prototype to support complex, multiple-phased projects

In Detail

Wireframes, interactive prototypes, and UX specifications are among the fundamental deliverables of every UX project. They are also the most labor and time intensive to produce due to constant changes in business requirements. Given these circumstances, Axure is quickly taking over as the preferred tool for prototyping. However, prototyping in Axure is strikingly different from the conventional method of producing static wireframes and to rapidly develop interactive prototypes in Axure, you’ll need to have a good understanding of the tool and its features.

Whether you are an individual practitioner or a member of a UX team, a consultant, or an employee, this book will teach you how to use Axure, one of the leading UX tools. You will learn to use Axure for producing top-quality deliverables and tackling the demands of rapid iterative UX projects of any complexity and size, and for any platform and device.

Axure RP 6 Prototyping Essentials takes a very pragmatic approach to showing you how to use Axure and produce impressive deliverables while saving labor and time. You may not be in a position to change how projects are scheduled, budgeted, and managed, but you can be more creative and productive by mastering one of the leading UX tools in the market.

After an initial introduction to Axure’s user interface, terminology, and features, this book walks you through a medium-size UX project: a digital library that sells books, newspapers, and movies. Although some aspects of the prototyping process are simplified for the sake of clarity and efficiency, the demo project is an opportunity to discuss in context and in sequence topics such as addressing business and technical requirements, handling use cases and flow diagrams, low and high fidelity wireframe construction, interactivity, writing annotations, generating detailed UX specifications, and traceability.

For the most part, Axure 6 RP Prototyping Essentials can be read in sequence or used as a reference guide.

Authors

Ezra Schwartz

Ezra Schwartz helps organizations realize their strategic vision for a world-class user experience. As a principal experience architect, he holds lead positions in mission-critical projects for global corporations. An advisor to management and stakeholders, Ezra is an expert in transforming large-scale, data-driven systems into mobile-first, device/OS-agnostic UX frameworks.
Ezra enjoys solving the numerous challenges involved in complex systems, the organizations that build them, and the people who use them. He draws on his wealth of experience from projects in the financial, education, aviation, healthcare, telecom, publishing, research, manufacturing, and software industries. Ezra feels very fortunate to be practicing in a domain that affords him the opportunities to travel and associate with the exceptional cast of international experts he gets to collaborate with. He values mentoring and giving back to his professional and social communities.
Ezra is the founder and organizer of AxureWorld.org, a free community-driven international conference dedicated to UX prototyping. He talks regularly about UX at conferences and on his blog, www.artandtech.com.

Alerts & Offers

Series & Level

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Learning

As a new user, these step-by-step tutorial guides will give you all the practical skills necessary to become competent and efficient.

Beginner's Guide

Friendly, informal tutorials that provide a practical introduction using examples, activities, and challenges.

Essentials

Fast paced, concentrated introductions showing the quickest way to put the tool to work in the real world.

Cookbook

A collection of practical self-contained recipes that all users of the technology will find useful for building more powerful and reliable systems.

Blueprints

Guides you through the most common types of project you'll encounter, giving you end-to-end guidance on how to build your specific solution quickly and reliably.

Mastering

Take your skills to the next level with advanced tutorials that will give you confidence to master the tool's most powerful features.

Starting

Accessible to readers adopting the topic, these titles get you into the tool or technology so that you can become an effective user.

Progressing

Building on core skills you already have, these titles share solutions and expertise so you become a highly productive power user.